The Digital Marketer’s Guide to Heavily Trafficked Holiday Promotions

Consumers are looking to spend even more money this holiday season compared to last year, with the average purchase projected at $540, up more than $100 from 2015. In addition, 40 percent of retailers plan on kicking off their holiday season campaigns before Halloween.

Now is the season to market early and often for online retailers. From boosting organic web traffic and increasing conversion rates to social media paid ads and promotions, the options are endless and sometimes overwhelming. Here is the digital marketer’s guide to wading through the sea of online stats and some advice to making the most out of another busy and lucrative online shopping season.

Driving Web Traffic

Getting more eyes on your site is a great way to gauge which products are most popular, raise word of mouth advertising and provide higher conversion rates. But the best organic way to drive traffic is through a defined content marketing strategy. Be sure to have keyword optimized blog posts added to your blog throughout the holiday season. One to two posts per week is a great target to keep customers engaged and boost your SEO ratings.

Backlinks are also an incredibly powerful tool to drive traffic and boost your site’s ranking. Reach out to bloggers and non-competitive, complementary businesses about mutual guest blogging opportunities. You can also consider paying for well-written sponsored content on websites that your target audience trusts. Tirebuyer.com is a great example of useful, evergreen, money-saving content and which builds rapport with customers that’s also SEO keyword optimized. With several different highly specific blog posts, Tirebuyer has created a one-stop holiday car shopping shop that includes the keywords “Cyber Monday,” “Black Friday,” “save big,” “buy tires” and “holiday shopping.”

Web Design Work

Now that you’re driving traffic to your site, it’s the right time to update it to maximize sales. Update your photos, change the copy on your home page and add a temporary sales tab on your main menu. You can bundle sale items, offer gifts with purchases; the opportunities are endless. But having a call to action on your homepage is one of the most effective ways to turn traffic into sales, so be sure to include motivating verbiage and a savings timeline to act now.

If your standard operating procedures for online customers don’t include follow-up emails for abandoned shopping carts and regular email updates, then you’re missing out on sales. Websites like MailChimp and Constant Contact will help save you time and make sure customers are well informed and about your brand in the barrage of holiday advertisements.

Social Media Paid Advertisements

If a good portion of your web traffic is coming from Instagram or Facebook, it’s time to consider social media marketing. Make sure to cross promote content on your different social media platforms and never duplicate content. That means your Instagram posts should not automatically post to Twitter.

In addition, make sure you’re getting the most out of any paid ads by studying their reporting tools and making informed adjustments to your ad campaigns. Experimentation, along with attention to detail, is the key to finding the ROI sweet spot.